If Pope Leo XIV had a seat on Tesla’s board, Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package would have been dead on arrival.

The 70-year-old pontiff slammed the widening income gap between the working class and the wealthy—specifically calling out the Tesla CEO as an egregious example of executive excess.

“CEOs that 60 years ago might have been making four to six times more than what the workers are receiving, the last figure I saw, it’s 600 times more than what average workers are receiving,” he told Catholic news site Crux in a September 2025 interview. “The news that Elon Musk is going to be the first trillionaire in the world: What does that mean and what’s that about?”

If that is the only thing that has value anymore, then we’re in big trouble,” he continued.

The Pope’s critique came in September 2025 as Tesla’s board approved a $1 trillion pay package for Musk—contingent on his ability to grow the electric vehicle company by eightfold over the next decade.

While Pope Leo is entitled to an over $400,000 yearly salary, on par with U.S. presidents and university chancellors, his concerns reflect broader anxiety about executive compensation. Among the 100 S&P 500 corporations with the lowest median worker pay, the average CEO compensation hit $17.2 million in 2024 as compared to an average median worker pay of $35,570, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. That’s a ratio of 632 to 1.

Billionaires’ wealth is booming—but their philanthropic giving isn’t

While everyday workers continue to struggle with inflation, wage stagnation, and a tightening job market, the wealth of the ultrarich soars. Billionaire wealth increased three times faster in 2024 than it did in 2023, according to Oxfam. And over the last decade, the top 1% increased their wealth by nearly $34 trillion—enough to eliminate annual poverty 22 times over at the highest poverty line.

Last year, Larry Ellison broke the record for the biggest one-day increase ever recorded in the history of Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index—with his net worth soaring $89 billion thanks to his tech firm Oracle’s rapid growth. At time of publication, Ellison’s net worth sits at $230 billion.

At the same time, many billionaires are behind on their pledges to give away their money through The Giving Pledge—the commitment launched in 2010 by Warren Buffett as well as Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates to give away at least 50% of their wealth to philanthropy during their lifetimes or in their wills.

Among the 256 signers, just nine have followed through with the pact; and even among those who donate, it’s largely given to intermediaries, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. Of an estimated $206 billion donated by the original 2010 Pledgers, roughly 80%, or $164 billion, has gone into private foundations.

And while The Giving Pledge told Fortune the IPS report “paints a misleading picture of the impact and intent of Giving Pledge signatories and the spirit and intent of the Giving Pledge,” the organization admitted there remain important questions that aim to “encourage greater giving.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on September 15, 2025.

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Any time one airline seeks to buy rival, the proposed transaction attracts anti-trust scrutiny and political controversy practically unmatched in any other realm of M&A. And due to its scale in an already highly-concentrated sector, and potential to raise fares, limit choice, and curb the frequency of service to dozens of smaller markets, this mother of all unions would face far fiercer than usual opposition on multiple fronts. Hence, it’s a long shot. But the industry insiders Fortune interviewed swear that it’s by no means impossible. The reason: The Trump Administration’s attraction to grand gestures—you can call it broad exercises in industrial policy—that remake wide swaths of the economy over (and may sideline the usual top goals such as ensuring strong competition).

Here are five burning questions this potential mega-merger raises.

How did United’s unusual quest come about?

The week of April 13, Reuters revealed, apparently for the first time, a White House meeting held on February 25th to discuss the over half-a-billion dollar re-development project planned for Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C. Reuters reported that President Trump hosted United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby at the confab. United’s the dominant carrier at Dulles, claiming an 82% market share. Fortune has further learned from people familiar with the talks that Susie Wiles, the President’s chief of staff, was instrumental in organizing the discussion. According to these sources, Wiles is strongly committed to the sweeping Dulles revamp that includes a new United concourse and would like to see Trump receive recognition for the new Dulles. “The president won’t rename Ronald Reagan Washington National for himself!” quips an industry insider. Texas governor Greg Abbott also attended, say people Fortune spoke to. Both airlines are crucial to the Lone Star State’s economy: American is headquartered in Ft. Worth, and United dominates George W. Bush Intercontinental in Houston.

According to the Reuters piece and other accounts, Kirby floated the joining of forces concept directly to the President. Kirby contended that the combination would achieve the giant scale required to better battle international airlines that, he’s noted in the past, are often heavily subsidized by their governments, handing them an unfair edge. In a September 2025 interview, Kirby observed that foreign-flagged carriers supply two-thirds of seats on flights headed abroad from U.S. airports. Yet around 60% of the passengers are U.S. citizens. Kirby reportedly emphasized to Trump that by attracting a larger proportion of international traffic, this super-carrier would hike American competitiveness and reduce our overall trade deficit. Neither Reuters nor other news organizations reported that Trump expressed a pro or con view on the Kirby idea.

Asked about the proposed prospect of a United acquisition of American at a briefing on April 15, press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that “It’s not anything we have a position on or are commenting on. I know the idea has been proposed by private industry but it’s not something the President or White House have an opinion on or are weighing in on at this time.”

How do soaring fuel prices play a role in United/American merger interests?

From 2005 to 2016, the U.S. airline industry endured a consolidation wave that reduced the number of major players from nine to the current Big Four, American, United, Delta and Southwest, the group that now controls 80% of the domestic market. In many of those deals, a jump in the price of jet fuel proved the tipping point forcing weaker carriers into the arms of stronger rivals, including America West’s takeover of U.S. Airways (2005), Delta’s acquisition of Northwest (2008), and Southwest’s purchase of AirTran (2011). Since the start of the Iran conflict on February 28, the price of jet fuel has jumped from $100 a barrel to nearly $200. That spike and especially the likelihood that after the conflict ends, costs will remain well above the pre-war level, is hitting the weaklings far harder than than the thriving warriors, especially the two biggest profit makers, Delta and United.

Of course, the leap triggered by the damage to oil infrastructure in the Middle East and closure of the Strait of Hormuz happened after the White House session on Dulles International. But American’s fragile financial state makes it highly vulnerable to any oil shock: In 2025, it earned just $111 million on $55 billion in revenues, and the interest expense on its crushing $37 billion in debt pretty much erased its operating income. By comparison, United posted $3.5 billion in profits on $59 billion in sales, numbers that give it lots of cushion to withstand all rough weather. Like Delta, United’s thrived by luring premium customers, especially the business crowd that pays extra to reserve at the last minute, while American’s struggled in attracting that highly lucrative tier.

Once again, a leap in fuel costs––they represent between 20% and 30% of operating expenses––promises to unleash a new wave of buying that further narrows the roster. As Delta CEO Ed Bastian said on Delta’s Q1 earnings call, “Over my career, I’ve seen many periods of disruption in this industry. And time and time again, high fuel prices have been the most powerful catalyst for change, separating the winners and forcing weaker players to rationalize, consolidate, or be eliminated.” American, the largest airline in the world, is also one of the most vulnerable to the force that more than any other, has reshaped the industry.

How would routes be affected if American merged with United?

A deal would create a colossus potentially wielding much greater power, in far more markets, than any airline ever. As of today, one of the two carriers hold market shares of 44% or more in eleven of the nation’s 50 largest airports. American’s captured 44% in Phoenix, 66% in Miami, 72% in Philadelphia, and 86% in Dallas-Ft. Worth, while United towers at 50% in Denver, 55% in San Francisco, and 75% in Houston. Locking arms would lift their slice of the passenger pies in the New York and Chicago airports, and in LAX, respectively to 45%, 70% and 46%. They’d also rise to number one from lesser status in Honolulu, Ft. Myers, West Palm Beach, Pittsburgh and San Antonio.

A recent report from Raymond James observes that today, American and United respectively command 70% or more of traffic respectively on 35% and 27% of their routes. Prior to any divestitures, United-American would reach or exceed that “highly concentrated” benchmark on around two-thirds of their city pairs.

The rub for passengers and regulators: Airlines make the most money when they’re either a monopoly carrier on a route, or face just one other competitor. Mike Fitzgerald, an analyst for Cowen & Co., projects that the pro-forma carrier would have no fewer than 287 of those metro-to-metro connections. What’s good for United could be a downer for travelers, and traditionally, anything that shrinks the list of rivals linking the same two metros from a longer roster to just one or two raises red flags for regulators.

Let’s get real: How likely is the deal to happen?

The Trump approach to airline consolidation represents a sharp departure from the Biden template. The previous administration quashed JetBlue’s purchase of Spirit in 2024—Spirit then went, and remains bankrupt––and successfully sued to nix a joint venture between American and JetBlue called the Northeast Alliance. By comparison, under the Trump regime Allegiant in mid-March gained antitrust approval for its acquisition of Sun Country after a quick review. The posture of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is particularly revealing. In a recent interview on CNBC, Duffy stated that he “sees room” for airline mergers. He also declared that the President “loves big deals,” suggesting that the POTUS might get a kick from green-lighting a biggie in this fabled, super-high-profile sphere.

Still, a United purchase of American would unleash strong opposition from state attorneys-generals who’d fear that their residents would suffer shrunken schedules and pricier tickets. Unions might also rebel since it’s notoriously hard to integrate seniority lists for the likes of pilots and flight attendants. Most of all, even though the Trump Administration favors a lighter regulatory touch, the near-monopoly clout the combination would exert on so many routes might prove a no-go for its DOJ.

But here’s the roadblock that may be decisive, and it has nothing to do with the opposition of regulators, AGs or unions. Duffy has cautioned that a major merger would require that the airlines “peel off some of their assets,” meaning axe gates and landing slots at airports where they hold extremely strong positions. Those requirements would clear the runways for competitors, including low-cost carriers, can ramp the competitive heat. That’s a big negative for United: The obligation to sacrifice many lucrative routes would undermine a lot of the potential benefits of the deal. The acquirer would also need to assume all of American’s massive debt. Yet United wouldn’t be getting full value due to all the carveouts at airports where competition is lowest and its profits potentially the highest. Plus, past cases show that it’s time consuming and expensive to combine reservation and computer systems, and fleets and workforces. So big expenses come up-front, and the benefits of consolidation––which may be minimal considering what’s “peeled off”–may be minimal.

So by conventional standards, the odds are long. On the other hand, the industry’s seldom seen a more daring swashbuckler than Scott Kirby. He’s done it twice before, and he recognizes that if it doesn’t happen under fellow wheeler-dealer Trump, it will never happen. News of Kirby’s proposal to Trump at the White House was a big surprise. A United and American flying under the same flag is probably a surprise too far.

Is Carl Icahn waiting in the wings?

Until all the speculation over United-American erupted, the takeover talk centered around JetBlue. In early 2024, legendary investors Carl Icahn took a 10% stake in the airline, and subsequently won two board seats. The Icahn blueprint typically revolves around buying into troubled targets on the cheap, then putting them in play. Now, JetBlue has reportedly hung out a “for sale” sign. Media reports say the Queens-based carrier’s hired advisers to pitch Alaska Airlines, Southwest and United. At age 90, the wily Icahn must know that the chances that Kirby wins American are long. But the mere size and scariness of that whale may make a United, or another airline’s, bid for JetBlue look harmless by comparison, especially since the Trump Administration’s already shown leniency on the Allegiant takeover of Sun Country.

No one’s talking about Icahn in the scenario making all the noise. But when the condensation trail clears, it could be this seasoned warrior behind the scenes who helps orchestrate the next big sale—a sale that’s part of still another fuel-shock-driven upheaval where the weak performers will need shelter. Who ends up with whom is a game to flummox even the greatest oddsmakers.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“The IPO is important for us to attract the most talented engineers to join us, to buy more GPUs, and to collect more data,” Victor Huang, Manycore’s chair and one of its cofounders, told Fortune ahead of the trading debut.

Manycore shares closed at 18.60 Hong Kong dollars ($2.38), 144% above the offer price of 7.62 Hong Kong dollars.

The Hangzhou-based startup is a bet on “spatial intelligence,” moving beyond the word- and language-based work of large language models like OpenAI’s GPT and DeepSeek’s V3 to instead create AI models that can autonomously work in the real world.

These programs, also called “world models,” are key to operations like robotics and autonomous driving, where machinery has to react to external stimuli, like how a robotaxi needs to slow down in response to changing traffic conditions. 

Huang described spatial intelligence as similar to a person or animal’s innate ability to understand the world around them. “When you enter a room, you can understand where you are and what’s in front of you. And if you want to take a seat, you can understand which seat is empty,” he explained.

“People are now trying to apply AI in the physical dimension,” Jixun Foo, senior managing partner at the Singapore-based venture capital firm Granite Asia, and an early backer of Manycore, said. He pointed out that viral videos of humanoid robots dancing, while impressive, are often carrying out pre-programmed routines. “If you want a different performance you have to program it again. You can’t just tell the robot to do this or that action.”

Graham Uden for Fortune

Some of AI’s biggest names are also working on “world models.” Both ImageNet creator Fei-Fei Li and former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun see these models as the next step in AI development. 

LeCun has argued that video data can help train world models, but Manycore and Huang instead think the startup’s vast repository of 3D assets will be a more useful data set. “I don’t believe that if you have enough video, you can train the rules of the physical world,” Huang said.

Instead, “we’d accumulated a huge amount of 3D data, almost 500 million assets from the real world. We had the training data, so we believed we could make the best physical AI in the world,” he argued. 

China’s AI sector has released many of its models on an open-source basis, which has helped to boost the reputation of its AI startups and won converts in the global tech sector, including in Silicon Valley. “People try Chinese AI. It’s free. It’s open-source. And when they try it, it’s great,” Huang explained. Manycore has already released several open-source models, including SpatialLM, a spatial language model that can understand and generate 3D environments, and SpatialGen.

Still, in recent weeks, some tech companies, like Alibaba and Knowledge Atlas, better known as Z.ai, have started to release models on a proprietary basis, at least in the initial stages, as monetizing AI work has proved tricky for Chinese companies.

But Foo thinks a company like Manycore can preserve its edge even if it open-sources its models. “For Manycore, it’s not just about their model, but also the data set they have built. That dataset is unique to them, right? If you have a competitive edge that you can hold on to, then you can open-source something,” Foo said.

The first of the ‘Little Dragons’ to go public

Manycore, founded in 2011, is one of the “Six Little Dragons,” an informal group of six tech and AI startups based in Hangzhou, now one of China’s leading AI hubs. Manycore is the first of the “dragons” to tap public markets; Unitree, the buzzy robotics manufacturer, will list on Shanghai’s stock exchange later this year.

The company got its start as a design software business, building Kujiale, a platform that lets users create 3D renders of interior spaces, and its international counterpart Coohom, which now serves customers in more than 200 countries. IDG Capital and Hillhouse Investment are among its previous backers.

Huang was an engineer on Nvidia’s CUDA team before returning to China to build a business around rendering. “The economy in the U.S. wasn’t doing well at the time, but in China, real estate was booming,” he recalled.

That work helped convince Foo, who spent time at HP, to back the company. “I used to use a lot of 3D software when I was designing HP printers,” Foo explained. “And I thought this was pretty cool: I was using it for mechanical products, and now they are doing it for a physical world.”

According to its IPO prospectus, Manycore generated 820 million Chinese yuan ($120 million) in revenue last year, growing by 8.6% from the previous year. It also earned a slim operating profit of 18.6 million yuan ($2.7 million), even as it posted an overall net loss of 428 million yuan ($62.8 million). 

China’s real estate market is still in the throes of a prolonged slump, which Foo admits is a “headwind” for Manycore. Still, the company is expanding into international markets. “What gives me comfort is the resilience of the team. They stuck in there, and they figured things out.”

Design companies have been hit hard in recent months; shares in Adobe and Figma have plunged as AI providers like OpenAI and Anthropic work design tools into their models. Some design startups are reinventing themselves as AI companies: Canva on Thursday launched a new suite of agentic offerings that allow users to automate much of the design process. 

A Hong Kong boom

This isn’t Manycore’s first attempt at public markets. The company was on track for a U.S. listing in 2021, before withdrawing its application after Beijing regulators scrutinized Didi Global’s U.S. IPO and forced the ride-hailing giant to delist, unnerving other Chinese companies considering U.S. listings. 

“Nowadays, the Hong Kong market is the best for a Chinese AI company,” Huang says. 

Manycore is just the latest AI IPO to hit Hong Kong’s market this year. AI and AI-related companies have led to a surge in debuts in the Chinese city, with listings raising almost $14 billion in the first quarter of the year. Some shares have surged by eye-popping amounts: MiniMax and Knowledge Atlas, two AI model developers, have risen by around 450% and 650% respectively since their early January IPOs.

More IPOs are on the way. Victory Giant, which makes printed circuit boards, hopes to raise $2.2 billion in its IPO; its shares will debut on April 21. Other startups reportedly considering IPOs are Kimi developer Moonshot AI and smart glasses manufacturer Rokid.

Bonnie Chan, CEO of Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing, pushed back at this week’s HSBC Global Investment Summit against the characterisation of the market as simply a conduit for Chinese capital. “When people say that Hong Kong’s stock exchange is just hosting Chinese companies, it’s not doing those companies justice,” she said, noting that around 40% of companies that listed in Hong Kong last year generated more than half their revenue from non-Chinese sources. “I call them Chinese MNCs. They’re very international.”

China’s AI sector has been under fresh scrutiny from global investors since early last year, when DeepSeek—another of Hangzhou’s “Little Dragons”—released its powerful and surprisingly efficient models, changing the conversation about Chinese innovation.

Physical AI, in particular, is emerging as a Chinese strength. The country’s dense manufacturing ecosystem can produce robots, sensors, and advanced components at a cost below rivals in other countries. Heavy investment in the electrical grid also allows China to rapidly expand the data centres needed to train large models. “It’s not just a race on the foundational model,” Foo said. “It’s a race on the infrastructure. It’s a race on compute. It’s a race on energy.”

But Foo and Granite Asia, which was born from the Asia operations of former VC giant GGV Capital, aren’t entirely focused on the Chinese market. “We are more pan-Asian,” he explained. Earlier this year, Granite Asia partnered with DBS to launch a new $110 million fund to give the Southeast Asian bank’s customers “early access” to IPO-stage companies in the region.

“Our strategy is to be able to invest in companies early. We want to help them grow and scale outside of their home market,” Foo says. “We have a good pipeline of companies going IPO.”

Update, April 17, 2026: This article has been updated with Manycore’s first-day share performance.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It was 2015, and Grede had built her own entertainment and talent agency, Independent Talent Brand, which saw her jetting between London and L.A. “I knew every manager, agent, publicist, lawyer in Hollywood, that was my job,” Grede recalls in an exclusive interview with Fortune. 

It put her in a perfect position to pitch her new idea: a radically inclusive denim brand tailored for women who’d been overlooked by mainstream fashion. In her mind, she’d already picked the perfect partner for the brand: Khloé Kardashian, who “embodied that idea right from the beginning.” The star had often been honest about her experience as the curvy sister. 

But here’s the catch: Grede hadn’t run a fashion business before, and the two had never worked together. Instead of waiting for an introduction, she boldly called the family matriarch and “momager,” Jenner herself. 

“I had an idea, and I formed the partnership in my mind,” the now 43-year-old self-made millionaire says. “The difference between me and someone else is that I made the phone call, I took the meeting, and I made it happen.

“I have no impostor syndrome and no delusions of who gets to run a business,” Grede adds. “I just thought, ‘If not me, then who?’”

Jenner asked Grede when she’d next be flying to L.A. to discuss the partnership face-to-face. At the time, Grede was only flying that way once a quarter, but she quickly lied and said she was heading there the next week. So that’s exactly what she did—and the rest is history. 

When Good American denim dropped a year later, it made $1 million on day one, making it the biggest denim launch in apparel history. And since then, she’s gone on to sit on the board of the Obama Foundation and become the first Black female investor on Shark Tank. Most recently, she’s teamed up with tennis champion Coco Gauff for a mentorship campaign with UPS.

Today, Grede says, she’s always advising founders to copy her, be more bold, and put themselves out on a limb: “An idea in your head is just an idea in your head. A lot of people talk and speak about things a lot—sometimes you just got to do.”

Emma Grede says she’s always been ‘audacious’

Grede’s confidence isn’t luck—or even something she developed alongside the billion-dollar success of her businesses. It’s a trait she was just born with. “I’ve got a lot of audacity, and I think that you need that to get to where you want to go,” the East Londoner tells Fortune.

In her late teens, for example, Grede had aspirations of working in Britain’s equivalent of Broadway. When the theater bosses ignored her handwritten notes asking for work experience, she stormed in there in person.

“I remember pounding the pavement in the West End,” she recalls. “I just thought because I didn’t get any answers, that maybe they weren’t getting my letters. So I took to hand-delivering letters.”

Even when she was holding down a day job, she’d boldly ask customers with enviable careers for work experience—and it would work.

“When I was working in a clothes shop, I would talk to everyone. I’d be like, ‘Where do you work? What would you do?’ If a stylist came in on a Friday and was doing a shoot on the weekend, I’d be assisting them on the weekend. I did that multiple times.”

She says she would actively put herself into “situations,” versus passively waiting for opportunities to come to her. After finding out where customers worked, she would follow up with: “Do you need some help? Can I come?”

Grede’s advice for jobless Gen Z: Kill your darlings

Millions of Gen Zers are currently unemployed—or rather, NEETs, not in employment, education, or training. 

Grede, meanwhile, has been working since the start of high school.

“I have had a job since I was 12,” she says. “I started delivering newspapers, then I worked in a deli, then I worked in about four different clothing shops, then I spent a year and a half doing work experience in every small designer and PR agency in London. Then I worked for Quintessentially, then I went to Inca Productions, where I worked for a fashion show production company. And I changed my job after about three years there. So I went from being an event producer to running the sponsorship department, and then I started my own company.”

Essentially, each experience led to the next. She treated every role—no matter how unglamorous—as a way to collect skills, contacts, and credibility that stacked into her next move. Thanks to a habit of speaking up and standing out, she squeezed real, résumé-worthy experience out of even the most unassuming jobs.

Of course, even Grede experienced her fair share of noes along the way: “I got very, very, very comfortable with rejection. If I think about how many things didn’t work out for me, there are a lot more than the things that seemingly on paper did work out.”

But she dusted herself off and tried again. It’s why her advice for those struggling to break in is to look at every experience as a step forward—even if it’s not the dream role yet. 

“I would think about the idea of transferable skills,” she advises Gen Z job seekers. “We all set ourselves up to think about exactly what we might want to do. And the reality is that you can learn pretty interchangeable skills anywhere.” 

Growing up, Grede was fixed on the idea of working in fashion. “I could have got a lot of those skills in an advertising agency or working in another creative industry,” she explains. Gaining experience at an art gallery or boutique and then working your way up the ladder is much easier than pining for a job at a fashion house straight out of college. You just have to put aside your ego and prioritize building momentum over perfection.

“I’d do anything to get yourself going in forward motion,” Grede explains. 

“In England, we have that lovely saying, ‘killing your darlings,’ and sometimes you just have to kill your darlings. You have to do whatever you’ve got to do to move forward. It’s better to just think about forward motion as opposed to being so fixated on what you’d originally imagined things would be like.”

A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on Sept. 23, 2025

Read more success interviews from Fortune’s Orianna Rosa Royle:

• L’Oréal exec cut her teeth at luxury brands Chanel and Kiehl’s. She says the secret to her success was always saying yes
• TodayTix CEO took over at 31. He tells aspirational Gen Zers to ditch the ‘fake it till you make it’ act if they actually want to be successful
• Scale AI’s 30-year-old billionaire founder still shops at Shein and pulls up to work in a Honda Civic: ‘Act broke, stay rich,’ Lucy Guo says
• Too Good to Go CEO’s big break came when she left her consulting career without a plan. She says losing $100,000 is ‘pretty cheap’ to pursue your dreams
• The millennial CEO behind Britain’s first compostable coffee pod unwinds by sitting in his infrared sauna after work

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“I am writing with concern over mounting allegations of dangerously lax anti-money laundering prevention by Binance,” said Blumenthal, in the letters sent to the Justice Department and the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Spokespeople for the DOJ and FinCEN also did not immediately return requests for comment.

As part of a 2023 settlement with Binance over compliance shortcomings, the U.S. government installed two monitors, who separately report to the DOJ and FinCEN, to ensure the exchange put in place appropriate measures to overhaul its compliance program. The monitorships, which began in 2024, were part of a larger plea deal in which Binance paid a $4.3 billion fine related to its failure to impose proper money-laundering and sanctions oversight.

Binance has since sought to project an image of corporate responsibility, but recent reports over Iranian crypto flows have prompted Blumenthal—along with other Senate Democrats—to probe the crypto exchange and the Trump administration over whether the exchange’s internal operations match its public rhetoric. 

Amid the public back-and-forth, Binance’s two monitors, whose roles include flagging any misconduct, have remained quiet.

Frances McLeod, the Justice Department’s chosen monitor and a founding partner at the consulting firm Forensic Risk Alliance, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Neither did Sharon Cohen Levin, FinCEN’s monitor and a partner at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell.

Monitorship on pause?

Blumenthal’s questioning comes after multiple outlets reported that Binance fired internal investigators who had warned top executives that over $1 billion had flowed through the exchange to Iran-linked wallets. Binance has said that the firings of the investigators were unrelated to their findings on Iranian flows, and that the crypto exchange maintains a rigorous compliance program. Spokespeople for the crypto exchange did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Blumenthal’s inquiry into the status of its monitors.

The Senator’s letters also follow a 2025 report from Reuters that stated that the Justice Department had paused its corporate monitorships as part of an informal review. In March 2025, a judge granted the DOJ’s request to end the monitorship of Glencore, the international mining company caught up in a foreign bribery scheme. Later that year, the DOJ also scrapped the requirement for the airplane manufacturer Boeing to have its own independent monitor.

Critics of monitorships, or when governments ask independent third parties to oversee a company that’s run afoul of the law, argue that they’re costly burdens for corporations or just not effective. 

In 2013, a U.S. court imposed an antitrust monitor onto Apple after ruling that the tech giant engaged in a price-fixing conspiracy. Other marquee companies to receive monitors include Deutsche Bank, Volkswagen, and Walmart. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“The economy is constantly shifting and no single household, no single consumer, is experiencing things exactly the same way,” Taylor Bowley, an economist at the Bank of America Institute, told Fortune in an exclusive interview. “When people look at GDP for instance, those prints look pretty good, but then when we really dive deep into some of this by income, we’ve also seen childcare has been a topic that has been particularly prevalent for so many households, because from an economist’s term, childcare isn’t necessarily a necessity, but for so many families it totally is. That is not a discretionary item.”

The gap shows up clearly in how the CPI is constructed. The Bureau of Labor Statistics assigns each category a “relative importance” weight based on average household spending.

As of December 2025, the combined category of tuition, school fees, and childcare accounts for just 2.5 of the index. But most of that reflects college tuition (1.35), while daycare and preschool make up just under 0.7.

That puts childcare on par, in CPI terms, with categories like water and sewer services, shopping club memberships, or tools and hardware—an unlikely reflection of how central it is for many families.

This isn’t an error; it’s a feature of the system. The CPI is designed to reflect average spending across all households, including those without children. But for families who do pay for childcare, those costs can take up a far larger share of their budget—meaning price increases will hit them much harder than the headline inflation data suggests.

“We’ve seen that childcare in our data has continued to rise,” Bowley adds. “The cost of childcare obviously impacts labor force decisions, and that in turn impacts labor growth as a whole.”

Consumers are well aware of this fact: In 2024, Pew Research asked nearly 9,000 people why they had chosen to, or did not, have children. The most popular reasoning was that either these people didn’t want to, or it just never happened. But 12% of respondents also said they couldn’t afford to raise a child.

The reality of childcare

Last year, Bowley reported that U.S. childcare costs were rising 1.5 times faster than overall inflation, up 5.2% year-over-year (YoY) in September.

Regional differences are also becoming more noticeable: New England was up 6.6%, for example, and the West North Central division surged 8.2% YoY as of September. Meanwhile, in the South, Nashville led major cities with a more than 6% increase from 2024 averages.

In the October note, Bowley highlighted that the share of households with more than one source of income making childcare payments each month is falling every year, most prominently among lower-income households. It stands to reason that paying for childcare has become so expensive that parents have little choice but for one of them to leave their jobs.

This “very much disproportionately impacts women,” Bowley added, “We’ve looked at how moms have traded in, to some extent, careers for childcare. One reason is that childcare has been, at least within CPI data, and very much so also within our own data, particularly sticky. It is still rising around 1.5 times the rate of overall inflation, which is a real pain point for a lot of families.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“In 30 years, we’re going to look back and say ‘oh, remember that period of time where those crazy software companies were selling seats for 90 to 95% margins?’” he said. “We’ll look back on that the same way we look back on mercantilism. ‘Remember when the East India Trading Company could move spice?’”

Ding—who went from growing up in a fishing village in China to spending years as a venture capital data junkie—has a unique vantage point on the so-called SaaSpocalypse. Ding is the CEO and cofounder of TextQL, a startup using AI agents to replace the laggard, consultant‑driven process of analytics with a speedy, plain language‑based interface. Data has long been at the center of the rise of enterprise software—and internal company data has always been difficult to wrangle in a way that AI is changing rapidly. 

On one hand, AI is about to clean up messy enterprise data, says Ding. On the other hand, that means more people than ever are going to be asking questions about that data. 

“Analytics is about to experience probably the most violent Jevons paradox anybody’s seen in a very long time,” said Ding, referencing the 161-year-old theory that more technological efficiency leads to more usage, not less. “Today, the cost of asking a question to seeing a chart that tells you what to do… is two weeks, a person, maybe $5,000–$10,000 of salary spent chasing those numbers down. With language models, with what we’ve built… you’re looking at an increase of five to six orders of magnitude, all‑in.”

Ding cofounded TextQL in 2022 with Mark Hay, and just closed $17 million in strategic investment led by Blackstone’s early-stage investment arm, Blackstone Innovations Investments, Fortune has exclusively learned. There’s a natural question here: Does Ding worry that what he’s doing with analytics can be easily replicated by the large AI labs? We’ve seen versions of this before, especially around coding: A few successful startups prove the market out, and OpenAI and Anthropic then swoop in with their own product (and the full force of their balance sheets). 

“I’m vaguely self‑aware that Anthropic wants to have this ecosystem of companies building within all the verticals,” said Ding. “And if a vertical grows fast enough, they want to run after it.”

In the short-term, Ding says he’s not worried, that he believes the challenges will only start when AI analytics produces its own $100 million ARR winner. In the meantime, his plan is to build in low‑liquidity markets like financial services and healthcare. Blackstone CTO John Stecher believes that, while the large labs remain “critical enablers,” they aren’t necessarily equipped to handle the enterprise data problem.

“The challenge enterprises are running into isn’t model capability; it is making AI work reliably, securely, and cost-effectively on real, messy internal data with the right security, governance, and cost controls,” Stecher wrote to Fortune. 

Ding brings up a good point, ultimately: That for all the talk around how data and AI are entwined, the foliage of the data jungle has proven much harder to slash through than people were anticipating even 18 months ago. But how we engage with asking questions of our data at work, inevitably, will look very different. 

“What does analytics look like in 150,000 years?” he said. “It probably looks like some entity, probably not human, that asks: ‘Of all the Dyson spheres currently orbiting around Alpha Centauri, how much copper alloy was mined from Titan?’ It’s analytics running autonomously.”

See you Monday,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Good morning. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase says the economy is resilient but vulnerable to risks. Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser says her company is resilient and off to an “exceptionally strong start.” Over at Bank of America, Brian Moynihan says the U.S. consumer is resilient, despite soaring gas prices. And Wells Fargo chief Charlie Scharf is here to remind us that life is complicated.

Welcome to earnings season! Banks are typically first to report (thank you, regulators!), offering some insights into the economy and a taste of what’s to come. Fraser had a new story to tell, with strong revenue and a restructuring plan dubbed “Project Bora Bora” that she says is 90% complete. Dimon delivered a familiar tale that somehow manages to instill calm and panic at the same time. We know consumers are resilient and oil prices hurt. Dimon already warned stagflation could be “the skunk at the party” in his shareholder letter. Two other themes to watch from 10-Qs and earnings calls of the Big Four banks.

Last Days of Disco. Investors are trading like frenzied night-clubbers wondering if the party’s about to end. Oil prices are up. They’re down. Peace talks are on! No, they’re not. Who’s betting what in the prediction markets? What’s the Fed going to do? Wait: the new Fed chairman is invested in Polymarket? Sell! Buy! Fear. Greed. That volatility produced a lot of profits and trading revenue for the banks, not to mention record bonuses for the traders. But volatility can reflect both uncertainty and mounting risk.

Don’t panic over private credit. Yes, there’s a $265 billion meltdown. Yes, the Fed wants more details on banks’ exposure to the largely unregulated $1.8 trillion market in non-bank lending. The Big Four did collectively report more than $128 billion in exposure to private credit loans this quarter. But Bank of America reported having “structural insulation” from loss in a market they characterize as “largely a repricing of liquidity.”  Dimon, the man who warned us that “when you see one cockroach, there are probably more” a few months ago, is now “not particularly worried.” Citi, which has arguably just recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, is “constantly stress testing” and  comfortable” with its portfolio. Wells Fargo isn’t worried, either, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doesn’t see a systemic problem. So relax, and go worry about that $39 trillion national debt instead.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Although Gen Zers are facing layoffs, hiring freezes, and AI anxiety at an unprecedented rate, landing a job at the HQs of Apple, Meta, and Alphabet “has always been a long shot,” Rogers warns. 

He would know: Rogers is one of the few British Silicon Valley CEOs. He started out in the small town of Grimsby—better known as the butt of a Sacha Baron Cohen movie than as a tech launchpad—and worked his way up to the top job in San Francisco via stints at Dell, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and more.

“I don’t remember it being easy back in the day, honestly,” he exclusively tells Fortune of breaking into Silicon Valley. “For me, for example, it was never going to be possible that I’d go straight to the hottest tech company in the hottest role. I always felt like I was going to have to work my way in, and I was going to have to work through experiences elsewhere that I would shine at.”

And now that Rogers is in the prime position of hiring and shaping the Bay Area’s workforce, he says that’s still the case. Despite the explosion of AI creating more tech jobs, competition for those entry-level roles is just as hard. 

Asana CEO’s advice for Gen Z looking to land jobs in Silicon Valley

Ask Rogers for advice on the next generation trying to crack California’s tech scene, and he doesn’t have a quick hiring hack or an interview stunt.

Instead, he recommends quietly building a résumé that’s impossible to ignore—even if it takes years and detours through less prestigious companies. Or as he put it: “Maybe come into the side door instead of the front door.”

Rogers stresses that landing an entry-level job, internship or grad scheme in big tech right after graduating “is a long shot.” Not impossible, but unlikely. For most Gen Zers, he says, the best route in is to build credible experience somewhere that’ll teach you the tech skills the big names will eventually want.

“For those of us that don’t get through the front door, it’s okay,” he adds. “There are side doors along the way, and you’ve just got to build towards that.”

“There are incredible experiences that you can get, maybe in smaller companies, maybe in a slightly different region, maybe in a slightly adjacent category. After a stint there, you would be super valuable.”

The mindset hack that’ll eventually lead to Silicon Valley success—or rather, his version of the donut box

Rogers is proof that a rejection letter from your dream tech company isn’t the end. He too, had to work his way up the ranks through “side doors” to get to where he is today. “My story ends in Silicon Valley,” he says. “But in the interim, I did really important roles in Texas. I did really important roles in Seattle, etc.” 

By the time he finally made it to San Francisco, he’d stacked enough varied experience that he could pull from a deep toolkit—what he jokingly calls his “donut box” version of presenting himself to tech bosses.

Ultimately, if you chip away at building skills in your twenties, the salary and title will come later. It’s slower than a literal donut box stunt (or even shooting bosses’ cold emails, or wearing a placard sign asking for work), but far more reliable.

“I once received some advice from someone, and they said learning before earning,” he adds. “You should make sure that the learning phase of your career extends as long as possible before you even think about the earning phase.”

“What that really meant for me was there’s no shortcut to putting the building blocks in place that you’re going to need to be successful.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The idea of a misery index was fathered by Arthur Okun, a distinguished economist and Yale professor who served as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1968 to 1969 during President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration. Johnson wanted an easy way to take the economy’s temperature. Okun’s index, which he used for the United States, is equal to the sum of the inflation and unemployment rates.

Okun’s misery index was modified by Harvard professor Robert Barro in 1999, by including the 30-year government-bond yield and the difference between the long-term-trend rate of real GDP growth and the actual rate of real GDP growth.

In 2009, I amended Barro’s version of the misery index by replacing the 30-year government-bond yield with lending rates, and by replacing the difference between the long-term-trend rate of real GDP growth and the actual rate of real GDP growth with the growth rate of real GDP per capita.

Then, in 2022, I made a further amendment to HAMI. Following Andrew Oswald’s (University of Warwick) suggestion, I decided to double the weight put on the unemployment-rate component in HAMI. The intuition is that an additional percentage point of unemployment hits people a lot harder than an additional percentage point of inflation. So, HAMI is the sum of the year-end unemployment (multiplied by two), inflation, and bank-lending rates, minus the annual percentage change in real GDP per capita.

Some might protest that the inflation rate and bank lending rate are correlated, and therefore HAMI double-counts the effects of inflation. Similar to the doubling of the unemployment weight, this is by design. The logic for this is rooted in loss aversion: People perceive losses as more significant than gains. Therefore, two items that contain inflation are included while the growth rate in real GDP per capita, a gain, is not double weighted.

Unlike Okun and Barro, who focused on the United States, HAMI covers many foreign countries; 178 are included in the 2025 edition — a new record.

Sources: Economist Intelligence Unit (including estimates), International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook, World Bank, International Labor Organization, and individual Central Banks and Statistical Institutes of each country.

Note: The Misery Index is the sum of the unemployment rate multiplied by 2, the end-period consumer prices rate, and the lending rate, minus the growth in Real GDP Per Capita. The median of the 2025 Annual Misery Index is 21.85. The mean of the 2025 Annual Misery Index is 31.64.

Calculations by Professor Steve H. Hanke, The Johns Hopkins University

The Rankings in Context

The 20 countries that are most miserable in 2025 are, once again, a familiar rogue’s gallery. Of the 20 most miserable countries in 2024, 17 remain in 2025’s top 20. Syria — which occupied a dismal third place in 2024 — has made the most dramatic exit, plunging all the way to 33rd following the fall of the Assad regime. Egypt and São Tomé and Príncipe have also departed. In their place, Botswana, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Brazil have entered, reflecting persistently high unemployment and elevated borrowing costs. At the happy end of the HAMI distribution, Taiwan retains the title of the world’s happiest economy for the second consecutive year, and Ireland — powered by extraordinary GDP growth — has climbed an impressive 54 positions to become the fourth-happiest economy on earth.

The ten most miserable countries in the world in 2025, listed by descending rank order, were Venezuela, Sudan, Turkey, Iran, Argentina, Eswatini, South Africa, Malawi, Madagascar, and Lebanon. I highlight the first three.

Venezuela: A Catastrophe Without Precedent

Venezuela seizes this year’s top position as the world’s most miserable country, with a HAMI score of 556.5 — the highest recorded in the 2025 edition and a devastating increase from its sixth-place ranking in 2024. The story is one of an accelerating collapse. The Maduro regime, having stolen the July 2024 presidential election and suppressed the democratic opposition by force, triggered a new wave of international sanctions that choked off oil revenues and sent the bolívar into free fall. The Banco Central de Venezuela’s own belated disclosure reveals that consumer prices rose 475.3% in 2025 — the highest inflation rate in the world. Unemployment, meanwhile, surged to 35.1%, reflecting the hollowing-out of a once-diversified economy. With the lending rate at 9.4% and real GDP per capita contracting by 1.6%, every component of HAMI conspires against the Venezuelan people.

Venezuela’s score is not merely the highest in the 2025 edition; it is among the highest ever recorded by HAMI. Until Venezuela replaces the bolívar with the U.S. dollar and establishes the rule of law and property rights, it will remain the world’s most miserable country.

Sudan: Civil War Without End

Sudan drops from first place in 2024 to second, but any improvement in relative standing offers cold comfort to the Sudanese people. The civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces — now in its third year — continues to devastate economic activity, displace millions, and fuel inflation. Sudan’s unemployment rate remains an extraordinary 55.7% — the highest in the world — reflecting the near-total destruction of formal labor markets in the war zones. Inflation, which peaked above 200% in 2024, has moderated to 68.1%. But the bank-lending rate remains at 37%, and real GDP per capita has contracted by 8.9%.

Until the guns fall silent, the HAMI will keep Sudan near the top of the world’s misery rankings.

Turkey: The Interest-Rate Trap

Turkey rises two ranks to third most miserable with a HAMI score of 101.0, driven primarily by a bank-lending rate of 56.7% — the highest in the top ten. Since the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey reversed its unorthodox monetary policy in mid-2023 and embarked on an aggressive tightening cycle, lending rates have reached punishing levels. Inflation has come down from its 2024 peak but remains elevated at 30.9%. Unemployment stands at 8.4%. Turkey will only come down on HAMI if it adopts a currency board, like the one I helped design and implement in Bulgaria in 1997.

The Year’s Most Notable Movers

Syria: From Third to Thirty-Third

Syria’s improvement of 29 positions — from 3rd most miserable in 2024 to 33rd in 2025 — is among the most remarkable stories in this year’s edition. In December 2024, a rebel offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham swept through the country with stunning speed, toppling the Assad regime that had ruled Syria since 1970.

The economic effects have been immediate. Syria’s consumer prices fell 12.2 percentage points in 2025, reflecting both the disinflationary shock of regime change and the easing of some war-era supply bottlenecks. But the HAMI score of 41.2 still reflects deep structural damage: unemployment remains at 18%, and real GDP per capita contracted at an annual rate of 5.4%.

Argentina: Progress, Not Yet Salvation

Argentina improves from being the 2nd most miserable country in 2024 to 5th in 2025, with its HAMI score falling from 195.9 to 88.4. This is a tribute to President Javier Milei’s shock-therapy program: inflation fell from 118% to 31.5%, and real GDP per capita grew by 4.0%. However, Argentina’s bank-lending rate stands at a punishing 46%, reflecting the residual cost of years of monetary mismanagement. Unemployment is 7.4%.

Argentina’s improvement of more than 107 HAMI points in a single year is nonetheless noteworthy. It is the largest score reduction of any country in the 2025 edition and a compelling case study in what a determined government can accomplish when it chooses economic sanity over populist spending.

Bolivia: The Year’s Largest Deterioration

Bolivia’s collapse of 47 positions — from 75th most miserable in 2024 to 28th in 2025 — is the largest deterioration of any country in this year’s edition. Bolivia’s HAMI score of 44.0 is driven by a sharp surge in inflation to 20.4%, as the country’s foreign-exchange reserves have been depleted and the government’s ability to maintain its fixed exchange rate has come under severe strain. Real GDP per capita contracted by 1.4%.

Burkina Faso: The Largest Improvement

Burkina Faso’s climb of 69 positions — from 101st most miserable in 2024 to 170th in 2025 — earns it the distinction of the single largest rank improvement in the 2025 edition. Consumer prices actually fell 2.2%, the lending rate declined, and unemployment edged lower, all of which combined to push its HAMI score to just 7.4 — placing it among the ten happiest economies in the world. The improvement is partly driven by favorable commodity dynamics and a statistical rebase, but it is nonetheless a striking result for a Sahelian nation grappling with insurgency and political instability.

Ireland: Growth as a Superpower

Ireland’s ascent of 54 positions — from 121st most miserable in 2024 to 175th in 2025 — makes it the fourth-happiest economy in the world and the second-largest rank improver. Ireland’s engine is a stunning real GDP growth per capita of 11.2%, fueled by multinational corporate activity and Ireland’s position as a European hub for technology and pharmaceutical firms. With unemployment at 4.7%, inflation at 2.7%, and a lending rate of 4.4%, Ireland’s economic headwinds are modest — though it bears noting that Ireland’s GDP figures are well-known to be inflated by multinational corporate booking activity, a quirk that may overstate the welfare gains felt by ordinary Irish residents.

Iran: Sanctions Bite Harder

Iran’s deterioration of 12 positions — from 16th most miserable in 2024 to 4th in 2025 — places Iran in the world’s top five most miserable economies for the first time since the HAMI began its modern coverage. The dominant driver is inflation at 52.6%, fueled by chronic fiscal deficits, ongoing sanctions, and a depreciating rial. The bank-lending rate of 24% adds to the burden. With real GDP per capita contracting by 2.9%, every arrow in Iran’s HAMI points in the wrong direction.

The World’s Happiest Economies

The ten happiest countries in the world in 2025, listed by ascending rank order, were Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, Ireland, Côte d’Ivoire, Macau, Japan, Qatar, Burkina Faso, and Guinea-Bissau. I highlight the top three below.

Taiwan: The World’s Happiest Economy

Taiwan retains the title of the world’s happiest economy for the second consecutive year, with a HAMI score of 2.1 — the lowest of any country in the 2025 edition. The secret ingredient is real GDP growth per capita of 9.2%, powered by insatiable global demand for Taiwan’s semiconductors and artificial intelligence hardware. Unemployment is low at 3.3%, inflation subdued at 1.3%, and the bank-lending rate at 3.3%.

Geopolitical threats from China notwithstanding, Taiwan’s economy in 2025 is firing on all cylinders.

Singapore: Monetary Discipline Made Manifest

Singapore is a perennial contender at the happiest end of the HAMI, and 2025 is no exception. With a score of 2.6, Singapore’s performance reflects near-full employment at 2.0% unemployment, well-anchored inflation at 1.2%, and solid GDP growth of 4.3% per capita.

Thailand: Consistent Excellence

Thailand is the third-happiest economy in the world in 2025, with a HAMI score of 3.1. Consumer prices actually fell 0.3% — mild deflation — while unemployment stayed at 0.8%. Real GDP per capita grew 2.5%. Thailand’s consistent appearance near the bottom of the HAMI table is no accident: the Bank of Thailand’s monetary framework has delivered low inflation and stable employment for more than a decade.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“I was thinking, well, it’s a little inconsistent for me to refuse induction, refuse to go into the military, yet pay taxes that would fund other people to go into the military,” the 81-year-old told Fortune. He estimates he’s withheld roughly $85,000 from the federal government over the decades.

Hedemann is a war tax resister—someone who refuses to pay federal income taxes as a form of protest against government spending they find morally reprehensible. And while he’s been at it for more than 50 years, recently he’s been getting a lot more company.

In the 15 months since the Trump administration returned to office—a period that has included ICE and Border Patrol killing Americans in Minnesota, the capture of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, and the start of a war in Iran—a growing number of Americans have decided that paying their federal taxes amounts to complicity. Some are withholding what they owe. Others are restructuring their lives to owe nothing at all.

Tax resistance has a long history in the United States, going back to the Boston Tea Party. During the Vietnam War, an estimated 200,000 Americans refused to pay a 10% telephone tax that directly funded the war. But organizers say the current wave is unlike anything they’ve seen in decades.

The war in Gaza was a “watershed moment,” said Lincoln Rice, national coordinator at the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC), which provides guidance on conscientious tax objection. Before Oct. 7, NWTRCC hosted a couple of Zoom workshops a year for 20 to 25 attendees. During the last few tax seasons, the organization has offered sessions every other week, drawing 100 to 500 people, and has seen a surge in calls, emails, and social media inquiries.

The demographics have shifted, too. Interest after the Gaza war skewed toward people in their 20s and 30s. After Trump retook office, it expanded to higher earners and people over 40 who were alarmed by DOGE’s firing of hundreds of thousands of federal workers and cancellation of programs. Now, Rice said, it comes from people of all ages and racial backgrounds.

‘I just saw myself in those mothers’

For Clara Vondrich, the turning point came on Feb. 28, when the U.S. hit an elementary school in Iran with a Tomahawk missile, killing more than 150 girls—most between ages seven and 12—and their teachers.

“I just saw myself in those mothers, and the lifelong devastation that they suffered for no good reason,” the 48-year-old lawyer and climate activist, who has an 11-month-old daughter, told Fortune. She said she’d been “horrified” by the administration since day one, but the strike pushed her toward civil disobedience.

“I believe that taxes should be used for building lives and not taking them, and so the idea that I would be paying into a war machine was just untenable for me,” she said. She feels so strongly that she wrote an op-ed in The Guardian and started a petition urging people to join the war tax resistance. 

Some of Vondrich’s taxes were already withheld by her employer, but she owes roughly $2,000 if she files separately from her husband, she said. She plans to redirect that money to a relief organization supporting Iranians or Gazans. As the breadwinner supporting her 87-year-old mother, husband, and daughter, she’s aware of the risks, but said she can’t pay in good conscience.

“I’m all for paying taxes. I’m all for putting my dollars towards initiatives that build our country,” she said. “I’d rather sleep at night than know that I’m skirting my obligation to support the common good.”

A life built around resistance

Hedemann has shaped his life around not paying federal taxes. He quit salaried jobs to freelance, so he could earn money without tax being withheld. He pays bills through money orders to avoid giving out his address. He even keeps a landline to protest the federal telephone excise tax—originally a 10% levy to fund military spending, now at 3% since 1983.

The consequences are real. Every year, Hedemann receives letters and calls from the IRS threatening liens or property seizures—but he doesn’t own a house or a car. In 1999, the IRS and the Department of Justice served him with an order requiring him to appear in federal court and explain why he shouldn’t be held in contempt for refusing to disclose information about his bank accounts and assets. The judge accepted his argument that doing so would assist the government if it chose to prosecute him.

Hedemann donates what he would owe to organizations, including Doctors for Global Health, the New York Times Neediest Fund, and the Alzheimer’s Association.

“The issue is not so much taxation, but is how that money is being spent. I’m not challenging taxation or that I owe taxes,” he said.

Earning less on purpose

Others have taken a different path: intentionally earning below the federal filing threshold of $15,750 for a single filer under 65.

Missy Pidgeon, 32, lives in New Jersey, works part-time at an organic vegetable farm, and plays in a band. She heard about low-income tax resistance a decade ago from friends, but didn’t start until the Israel-Hamas war.

“My salary is just low enough that with credits and other things that I work out for the year, I don’t owe a tax debt,” she said. Her lifestyle allows her to spend time on activism and volunteering at a thrift store that supports a community food pantry and emergency assistance.

She’s clear-eyed about the burden tax resistance can present. “I’ve been working on building this lifestyle that I live to fit into my ability to be a low-income war tax resister, but it also comes at the privilege of having a lot of familial support,” she said. “I don’t have debt from school.”

The risks are real

NWTRCC advises people to file their taxes accurately and does not encourage anyone to falsely claim exemptions. The organization says the “safest” method is adjusting deductions on W-4 forms, though Rice acknowledges this is illegal. His role, he said, is to make sure people understand what might happen.

“The average thing that might happen is they might face a wage garnishment or some sort of collection in the future,” Rice said. “They most likely won’t lose their house, won’t go to jail, all those sorts of kind of biggest fears.”

“We always let people know, it’s always what you’re comfortable with, what feels right to you, but if you lie on your tax forms, your risk of criminal prosecution increases exponentially,” he said.

Tax experts stress that the law offers no exemption for people who oppose the government’s policies. 

“Some of the promoters of tax resistance often forget that there is a price that comes with protest. There is not a legal option not to pay just because they’re frustrated or they don’t believe that the tax system is created the way it should be,” said Danshera Cords, a tax lawyer and professor emerita at Albany Law School.

The IRS can impose liens that damage credit scores, which, in most states, can affect insurance premiums, along with fines, compounded interest, and property seizures. Willfully not paying can be charged as a misdemeanor punishable by up to $25,000 in fines for individuals and, in rare cases, up to a year in prison, Cords said.

For the people who’ve decided to resist, those risks are part of the calculation.

“I’d rather have the sense of self-determination than know that I was directly funding this,” Vondrich said.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• Markets: Record highs!
• Meet the anti-AI groups facing questions after the attack on Sam Altman.
• Peace is in danger of breaking out in the Middle East.
• Why the price of oil doesn’t go down even when you are self-sufficient in it.
• Jamie Dimon sells $40 million in stock.
• Diamonds are really cheap.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“They’re more like supermarkets than traditional tech or industrial enterprises, but their turnover isn’t in the likes of grocery items. It’s the stuff that generate their large language models, vector search, and other products,” Brightman told me in a phone interview. “They’re in an arms race where they need to replace their hardware very rapidly, in other words, restock their shelves in a hurry.” The problem, Brightman asserts, is that hyperscalers are taking losses on the large language models, vector databases, and other products they’re selling to companies and consumers, so the more hardware they buy, the more money they lose. “Right now, each is using AI to maintain crucial dominance in their field, and that makes sense,” Brightman observes. But, he adds, the immense spending needed to maintain those “moats” and keep rivals at bay could generate puny returns going forward, and harm their overall profitability.

In the article, Brightman spotlights the historic surge in AI capital expenditures (capex) that has mushroomed from $250 billion in 2024 to $650 billion this year by Bloomberg’s estimate, equal to 2% of GDP. That industry’s historic appetite for capital spawned the view that AI is becoming the new steel or railroads. But as Brightman points out, the equipment and infrastructure that supported those businesses is far different from the gear that drives AI. “Steel mills and rail tracks depreciated over 40 to 45 years,” he writes. He then contrasts those multi-decade useful lives to the scenario in AI. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta are depreciating their GPUs and other hardware over roughly five or six years on their income statements. Although those spans appear short, he says, their real “lives” are much shorter.

In an economic sense, assets become fully depreciated, or turn obsolete, when the revenues they generate no longer cover their cost of acquisition (reflected in yearly depreciation), operating expense, and cost of capital. According to Brightman, the industry numbers show that AI hardware loses its value over about three years. As proof, he cites data on the profitability of Nvidia’s industry-standard H100 GPUs. In their second year, an H100 spawned $36,000 in annual profit for a 137% return on investment. But by year four, the product was losing over $4,400 for a negative ROI of 34%, and the results sank fast from there. Writes Brightman: “The economic life of AI hardware is [a lot] shorter than its accounting life.”

It’s not that the equipment wears out. Physically, it can actually run a lot longer. The reason AI hardware loses potency so fast: Nvidia, AMD, and the other producers are crafting fresh offerings that each year provide enormous increases in computing power per watt deployed. Since the hyperscalers face tough energy constraints, they are constantly seeking gobs of new “compute” using dollops of extra electricity. Normally, if typical manufacturers were adding capital at the pace the hyperscalers are setting in AI, they would already have built a gigantic base of equipment and infrastructure they could deploy for years, without the need to keep buying more. Not so in this brave new business. AI equipment is evolving so fast that each year, the hyperscalers need to replace an immense part of their capital base just to maintain the same capacity for forging AI wonders. “Most of their spending isn’t growth capex, it’s ‘maintenance’ capex,” says Brightman. Nevertheless, the overall numbers are so huge that although only about one-third goes to expansion, that’s still good enough to hugely grow the volume of products and services they can deliver each year.

The hyperscalers are using AI, and taking big losses, chiefly to protect their turf

On our phone calls, Brightman nailed the conundrum for the giants of AI. “As they ramp the compute, they lose more and more money,” he says. “But they have plenty of rationale to do so for now.” All of the Big Four aim to provide the best AI features to enhance their signature offerings, and recognize that they will lose their leadership in those staples if the AI component isn’t top-notch. Amazon makes most of its money providing computations and storage in the cloud. It’s unable to recoup nearly the cost of the AI additions from its customers, says Brightman. “But it’s sensible because if Amazon doesn’t stay in the arms race, they’ll lose the cloud business. They need the AI services as part of the cloud component.”

As for Microsoft, its staple is office software that generates subscription revenues, notably on its 360 platform. That franchise now faces stiff competition from Google’s docs and sheets products. “To protect its existing business and keep its customers, Microsoft has to offer AI model services, even if it’s losing money on its AI capex,” declares Brightman. Alphabet is preeminent in “search,” and cleans up as the world’s biggest seller of online ads. Microsoft has mounted a challenge by launching its own search engine. “To continue its profitable line of business and keep its edge, Alphabet needs the AI element, and that requires big investments in data centers,” says Brightman.

Meta has to worry about the other three invading its highly lucrative, social media advertising business. “People come to their platform to see the pictures and the video, and it costs Meta a lot of money to produce that content that supports the ads,” notes Brightman. Meta uses AI to personalize feeds for users, rank content on Instagram and Facebook, and check posts for safety, and needs those uses to maintain its lead. Yet once again, says Brightman, it can’t yet charge enough for its ads to pay for its gigantic new spending needed to provide those fantastic features.

Brightman concludes that the gusher in AI investment doesn’t mean that this revolutionary advance will prove a big profit spinner for the Big Four. It’s more a weapon for each titan to defend its domain. “When capital turns over rapidly, and competition forces continuous reinvestment, extraordinary spending can sustain competitive position without creating value for shareholders,” he states in the article. Once again, the shelf life of what’s filling our data centers is so brief that buying GPUs, say, is more like replenishing supermarket stocks than building factories that endure for decades.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy has a very different take. In his latest annual letter to shareholders, he stated that AWS chips, servers and networking gear have a useful life of 5-6 years.

On the other hand, Brightman told me, the stuff that is costing these champions big-time helped him greatly in preparing his analysis. “A year ago, this project would have taken me nine months to do the research and modeling. But I used the best of Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and synthesized their feedback, and did it start to finish in three weeks,” he recounts. Brightman’s vignette tells the story: This new industrial era may be a lot more beneficial to the folks and businesses that use the AI-enhanced products than the enterprises that furnish them.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

However, each new model release reveals something counterintuitive: as more models flood the market, the more they become commodities. If that’s the case, then the question becomes: what is the differentiator for businesses trying to adopt and scale AI? 

The answer comes down to one word – trust. 

Over time, the model that sits on your desk is going to matter less than the trusted, connected intelligence that feeds into it. I think of connected intelligence as curated data drawn from multiple, organized sources. As a result, an AI model can reason across all of the data at once rather than working from a single, incomplete picture.

Here’s another way to think of it: AI models are the cars we’re driving and they’re improving every day. However, data and intelligence are the navigation system – the difference between knowing you’re moving and knowing where you’re going. A basic GPS running on an outdated map might get you somewhere – but will it get you there reliably and quickly? 

Maybe.

But “maybe” isn’t good enough when it comes to high-stakes decisions – especially in financial services. We’re talking about some of the world’s most consequential decisions that impact people’s ability to get a loan, receive affordable insurance, and keep their money safe from financial criminals. These models need a source of truth to reason on – otherwise, we’re not only increasing the odds of poor outcomes, we’re gambling with public trust precisely at a time when trust in institutions is in worldwide decline.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made this point recently when he said, “Structured data is the ground truth of AI.” He was identifying what the industry has been slow to acknowledge: that a powerful model requires trusted data. And not all data earns that distinction. 

Data needs to be organized, normalized, and calibrated against the way the world actually works. It’s painstaking work and can’t be done just by scraping the web, which is why organizations that marry the best models with this kind of connected intelligence will build trust. In addition, it will also ensure that decisions based on AI can be defensible to boards, regulators, customers, and shareholders. 

The consequences of getting the data foundation wrong are already showing up. According to MIT, 95% of AI pilots are failing to deliver measurable impact. That’s partially because the data foundation is too weak. More powerful models don’t solve this problem – if anything, they make the consequences of producing a bad output harder to detect and more costly to reverse. 

Read the news and the risks of a bad output are obvious: tariffs are reshaping global trade overnight, geopolitics are redrawing supply chains, extreme weather events are defying historical models, and cyberattacks are targeting critical infrastructure. As the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2026 report makes clear, risks continue to spiral in scale, interconnectivity, and velocity. 

For banks, insurers, and asset managers, this connectedness is not theoretical – it’s the difference between being reactive to risk and getting ahead of it.  In this era of Exponential Risk, the defining challenge is not only that threats are growing in magnitude – they are also growing in connectedness. For example, an extreme weather event that damages infrastructure could impact a critical supply chain node, which has a derivative impact on economic growth and credit. For a financial services company, using generic AI coupled with fragmented data cannot get you a defensible answer on how to assess those risks. However, connected intelligence – spanning different data sets on climate, credit, and compliance – can get you closer to an answer you can trust. 

As more data sources are unified, a picture of risk emerges that is fuller, more precise, and more actionable than anything a siloed approach can produce. That’s why companies that unite data from third parties alongside the data they own will be the ones who make better, faster decisions – and can defend those decisions when it counts.

Over the last three years, the complexity and capability of models has drastically improved. However, it’s time to start focusing on perfecting the intelligence behind them. These are not decisions reserved exclusively for engineers. They are for anyone serious about unlocking the true power of AI. Every organization deploying AI at scale needs to ask its data teams the same question it asks AI vendors: is this intelligence reliable, connected, and tested against real outcomes?

Because the stakes go beyond revenue and growth, they also matter for anyone who’s concerned about strengthening the institutional trust markets run on. Moody’s was founded over a century ago on the conviction that markets function better when everyone has access to transparent, rigorous, and independent data and analysis. That is as true today as it was then, and AI doesn’t change that principle – it just raises the cost of getting it wrong.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Cryptocurrencies are volatile, sometimes rocketing up in price with one tweet from one volatile man. (Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, or Binance cofounder Changpeng Zhao… take your pick.) And veteran crypto venture capitalists have weathered their fair share of bear and bull markets, watching their holdings soar in value during the NFT hype cycle of 2021 to only see their portfolios plummet in the ensuing “crypto winter.”

In other words, short-term changes in the value of a crypto venture fund’s portfolio aren’t usually a sign of performance. And assets under management are poor barometers of a venture fund’s success, generally. Ultimately, top-notch investors are supposed to exit companies and give money back to their limited partners.

Behind the curtain

Still, digging into crypto VCs’ holdings provides a glimpse into their funds’ inner workings. 

Take, for example, a16z crypto. The total assets under management for its four crypto funds plummeted almost 40% between 2024 and 2025 to $9.5 billion—even as its parent Andreessen Horowitz saw its holdings balloon past $100 billion, according to data from the SEC. 

That decrease is partly because the venture giant began to distribute capital back to investors from its first three funds, according to sources familiar with the matter, who spoke anonymously to discuss private business dealings. One source told me that a16z crypto timed the distributions to coincide with the 2025 crypto market’s highs. In fact, the net DPI, or distributions to paid-in capital, for a16z’s first crypto fund was 5.4, according to Newcomer. Those returns are stellar compared to those from other VCs who raised in 2018, per data from Carta.

Pantera Capital also distributed capital back to investors in 2025 on the back of five portfolio companies that went public, including Circle and BitGo, said another source familiar with the venture’s operations.

Other crypto investors likely saw their holdings fall because the markets turned sour. Multicoin, especially, has been at the whims of crypto’s booms and busts. The VC also runs a hedge fund, and when digital assets were all the rage in 2021, it saw its assets under management almost triple to nearly $9 billion from the year prior. After the collapse of crypto exchange FTX in 2022, the investor’s portfolio plummeted and then rebounded in the following two years. It has now plunged again: From 2024 to 2025, its assets under management more than halved to nearly $2.7 billion as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin nosedived beginning in October.  

And only one top investor saw its stockpile grow. Haun Ventures, the outfit founded by former a16z partner Katie Haun, saw its assets under management jump more than 30% year-over-year to almost $2.5 billion. While the venture investor has made some well-timed bets (including on the stablecoin startup BVNK that Mastercard agreed to acquire for up to $1.8 billion), Haun Ventures was also raising a new $1 billion fund in 2025, my former colleague Leo reported last year. (We will miss you, Leo!)

Other peers are also seeking capital. Paradigm is looking to drum up as much as $1.5 billion, a16z crypto is raising up to $2 billion, and Dragonfly just closed a $650 million fund. And, perhaps next year, the portfolios of these other crypto venture investors will grow—if the crypto markets revive themselves after a dreary winter.

Spokespeople for Paradigm, Pantera, a16z crypto, Multicoin, Dragonfly, and Haun Ventures all declined to comment.

See you tomorrow,

Ben Weiss
X: @bdanweiss
Email: benjamin.weiss@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Joey Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

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People scrutinize product reviews before making even minor Amazon purchases. They research restaurants based on Google and Yelp ratings. They spend hours meticulously investigating the merits of different hotels and cruise ships.

But when the time comes to choose a surgeon for a major procedure — a decision far more consequential than any online purchase, dinner reservation, or vacation itinerary — most Americans don’t realize they can, and should, shop around.

Instead, they rely on referrals from primary care physicians or recommendations from friends and family. Those referrals are well-intentioned, but they are not always grounded in objective performance metrics.

That’s a problem. Research consistently shows that outcomes for the same procedure vary widely from one hospital to another, and even from one surgeon to another within the same hospital network. Patients deserve access to this data, so they can choose the best care.

A landmark New England Journal of Medicine study found that patients undergoing certain high-risk procedures at hospitals that only occasionally hosted those operations faced substantially higher mortality rates than those treated at high-volume centers, with differences in rates reaching 12% for some operations. Another study found that patients undergoing joint replacements had roughly 33% higher odds of complications when the procedure was performed at low-volume hospitals rather than high-volume hospitals.

The variation doesn’t stop at the hospital level. It exists between surgeons, too.

“Practice makes perfect” is a truism in sports — and in medicine too. In orthopedics, the benefits of an experienced surgeon are most evident after patients leave the operating room: fewer complications, fewer infections, fewer revision procedures, and smoother recoveries. A recent analysis of 12 studies found that patients who underwent shoulder surgery with surgeons who perform the procedure frequently had lower rates of repeat operations and hospital readmissions.

Technical skill alone has been shown to account for more than a quarter of the variation in complication rates among surgeons performing the same procedure.

Despite the life-altering consequences, most patients never seek out this data. Many don’t even realize it exists.  

That pains me. As an orthopedic surgeon, I welcome questions and value open dialogue with my patients. Most of my colleagues do as well.

Here are three questions every patient should ask before a major surgical procedure:

1. How many times have you performed this procedure in the past year? Volume matters. Ask about complication and infection rates, and how often patients require readmission or revision surgery. Every surgery carries risk — but those risks are not identical everywhere.

2. How do your outcomes compare to national benchmarks? Surgeons engaged in research and quality review should be able to answer this. If they cannot, that is itself informative.

3. How are you staying current on best practices? Medicine evolves rapidly. New techniques, implant designs, infection-prevention strategies, and recovery protocols emerge continually. Surgeons who participate in research, teach, and attend specialty conferences are more immersed in ongoing performance review and improvement.

Studies examining newly adopted procedures show why this matters. In one analysis of a new colonoscopy technique, complication rates varied almost twofold between physicians — a far greater variation than seen with the traditional colonoscopy technique.

When feasible, patients should consider academic medical centers, which tend to prioritize data tracking, peer review, and continuous quality improvement. While excellent surgeons practice outside academic centers as well, these environments are more likely to measure outcomes rigorously and integrate new research into practice quickly and systematically.

The burden, however, should not rest solely on patients to uncover this information one question
at a time. Hospitals and health systems should publish data on complication rates, readmissions, revision surgeries, and patient-reported recovery metrics. Just as consumers can compare car crash-test ratings, patients should be able to review standardized, side-by-side surgical performance data before making life-altering decisions.

Greater transparency would also strengthen the healthcare system as a whole. Public reporting drives improvement. Reducing preventable complications spares patients unnecessary suffering and lowers costs for families, employers, and insurers alike.

Americans commonly check restaurant reviews and ratings to make sure they don’t get a bad meal. It should be just as common for patients to compare their physicians and hospitals before undergoing a major procedure. And it’s up to the healthcare system to start proactively providing that evidence. Patients deserve nothing less.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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Good morning. Not every CEO will have a book written about them. But if they do, what should they try to get out of it? For Demis Hassabis that moment has arrived with the publication of The Infinity Machine, the new biography written by Sebastian Mallaby (author of More Money Than God on hedge funds and The Man Who Knew, the biography of Alan Greenspan).

Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs, knows that the book changes his relationship with the public. “I am a pretty private guy,” he said at a launch event in London this week. The 1,000-seater venue was sold out, filled with a mix of young people keen to know about the future of work and older generations concerned that artificial intelligence will upend the world as we know it.

I was there, alongside the academics and senior technology executives, to listen to one of the few Tech Gods to work outside the hothouse of the U.S. and, more specifically, Silicon Valley.

Here are my three takeaways from the 60-minute conversation:

AI leadership needs to be dispersed. Hassabis finds London attractive as the headquarters for Google DeepMind because it is not in America. He has nothing against Americans, of course; Alphabet has owned DeepMind since 2014. But he believes we need different centers of excellence around the world to mitigate the risk of AI becoming a product of a certain way of thinking. “The people that are making artificial intelligence shouldn’t just be from 20 square miles of the U.S.,” he said. “It’s going to affect the entire globe. So I think a global perspective on AI, what it should be used for, how it should be deployed, the ethics of it, the technology itself, [is important].”

The commercial race isn’t the most important one. Amid all the commercial noise on who is winning the chatbot war—Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, a host of others—we are probably missing something more fundamental. Who is providing the guardrails to mark the boundaries of acceptability? “At the back of my mind, I’ve got this gnawing feeling that there’s something much more important, much bigger than the commercial race, which is getting AGI safely over the line for humanity and to make sure that the benefits fully outweigh the risks. And, you know, I’m going to try,” Hassabis said. In the present geopolitical environment, he admits such a task is going to be “very hard.”

Education needs a rethink. It sounded like a throwaway point but actually wasn’t: Hassabis argued that we need to completely upend education so that learning in the classroom is a collaborative process between pupils and teachers (how to solve problems, find new pathways) rather than a traditional place to “learn” facts and figures. “We should be really reconsidering education from the ground up…invert the classroom, so that it becomes more about collaboration and project-based and creative problem solving,” Hassabis said. “Then you do the rote learning outside of the class, where you do it with your AI systems and it is personalized to you.”

The first takeaway is fact, and it works. The second is a hope that is one almighty challenge. And the third is a suggestion about the future that should happen, and if it doesn’t we should be asking politicians and teachers why. For my full piece on Hassabis and the future of AI—and what he thinks “doing his best” really means—read more here. —Kamal Ahmed

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

German workers take an average of 14.8 sick days per year, giving the country one of the highest rates of absenteeism in Europe. For context, that is four times the UK’s sick leave rate. 

And it’s costing the country’s businesses around around €82 billion ($110 billion) a year, according to the German Institute for the Economy.

So, now Chancellor Friedrich Merz is reportedly considering a drastic solution: turning to workers to front that cost. 

German workers who take 5 or fewer days off sick will get a bonus 

Currently, the country has a very generous sick leave policy: up to 6 weeks (30 working days) fully paid for the same illness, with a doctor’s note. They can take 5 days off sick without seeing a doctor in person, before needing to get a formal extension. And if the employee gets sick again due to a different illness, the 6-week period restarts. 

The Christian Democratic Union’s (CDU) proposed plans would see workers’ pay docked from the very first day they call in sick. Meanwhile, workers who take 5 days or fewer would receive a bonus. 

The goal, according to German tabloid Bild — which broke the story over the weekend — is to nudge workers with minor ailments, like a cold, back into the office rather than reaching for the phone. 

As one government insider put it: “It’s certain that Germany has the highest number of sick days in Europe. Both coalition partners would like to reduce that.”

In 2023, Germans called in sick nearly 20 times a year—a record high. That figure has since fallen by around 5 days, but bosses have still been complaining about “work-shy” Gen Z exploiting the system amid persistently high rates compared to other European countries. 

Merz, meanwhile, has made his feelings towards Germany’s sick leave culture clear: Earlier this year, he underscored just how many weeks of 14.8 days leave employers high and dry: “That’s nearly three weeks in which people in Germany don’t work due to illness,” he stressed. “Is that really necessary?”

He’s also blamed the Germans’ lifestyle approach to work for the country’s low productivity. Merz said in a recent speech: “To put it even more bluntly: Work-life balance and a four-day week will not be enough to maintain our country’s current level of prosperity in the future, which is why we need to work harder.”

Fortune has reached out to the German government for comment.

Burnout is becoming a major global issue

Although Germans are leading the charge, they’re far from the only workforce cracking under pressure. Burnout has become one of the defining workplace crises of the post-pandemic era—and the data suggests it’s getting worse, not better.

One shocking study highlights that 54% of American workers report feeling unhappy at work, with the frequency ranging from occasionally to constantly. Yet they’re still showing up for their jobs, sitting at their desks, and silently emotionally struggling.

Office overachievers are so burned out that workplace experts have taken stock of the phenomenon and even given it a name: a “competence hangover.” 

Research consistently shows it’s millennials who are burned out the most—the generation has wound up in middle management and bearing the brunt of layoffs. And in the UK, a mental health crisis among young workers is fuelling a surge in workplace anxiety, stress, and absenteeism that employers are struggling to get a handle on. They’re mentally checked out, on average, for one day each week.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that, at the same time, research shows office politics have made a major comeback post-pandemic: Return-to-office mandates, AI-driven efficiency, and layoffs have caused backstabbing and “workplace incivility” to spiral.

It’s gotten so bad that burned-out workers are phoning in sick and increasingly using medical leave as a way to escape—not because they’re actually unwell but just to mentally recover from their “toxic” bosses, decompress, and even job hunt. It perhaps might explain why Germans are pulling sickies so often.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Instead, Gerard and his wife were trained in how to do in-home dialysis by Monogram Health and, since starting, both his kidneys and all his pre-existing conditions have improved. Gerard still receives dialysis, but he does so at home, conveniently supported by a virtual care team, remote monitoring, and regular in-home visits with a clinician.

Gerard’s success is one example of what we can achieve when we evaluate the whole patient and treat multiple conditions where the patient feels most comfortable: at home. Rather than make patients sit in waiting rooms, this model offers a simpler, proactive, technology-enabled approach that meets patients where they are. We now have the tools – and partnerships – to make it possible.  

AI and data analytics help identify risk of acute conditions and trigger a proactive clinical intervention before a crisis occurs. Digital capabilities and virtual platforms allow clinicians to check on patients between visits and enable a myriad of treatments for chronic conditions to be delivered safely and effectively to a patient’s home. 

Certain levels of process, paperwork and – yes – waiting rooms will not disappear because of what some procedures and centers demand. But the waiting room should not be the symbol of American health care. 

Gerard is one of a growing number of aging Americans who demand more to stay healthy. U.S. Census Bureau projections show that by 2034, for the first time ever, older adults (65+) will outnumber children (under 18). This challenge is compounded for older Americans with multiple chronic illnesses — the fastest-growing segment of our population. By 2030, 83.4 million people in the U.S. will have three or more chronic diseases, nearly triple that from 2015. 

As seniors continue to battle conditions such as heart failure, COPD, kidney disease, and diabetes, they may see half a dozen specialists a year, leaving them to juggle conflicting advice, confusing processes, long wait times, and complicated medication lists. As physicians, we have seen the problem up close.

The good news is that, with better tools, a new approach to patient care is here. Through our partnership, Aetna and Monogram are reimagining healthcare —slowing disease progression, delivering comprehensive, holistic care and treatment in the home – which in turn can reduce ER visits and hospitalizations. This simpler approach results in more affordable care for patients.

And our optimism is supported by results. Last year our partnership delivered 33,975 completed clinical treatments that span pulmonary disorder, heart failure, diabetes and related conditions.  Among patients who were enrolled for at least 13 months, there was a 32% decline in readmissions and a 16% decline in emergency room visits. [Outcome data cited in this article is self-reported by Aetna and Monogram and is not independently verified by Fortune.]

To truly redesign the delivery of care, providers and payers must “stack hands” and share accountability for outcomes. Providers bring clinical expertise, trust, and in-person experience with their patients while payers have data, predictive analytics, and population-based engagement tools. 

Policy also plays a role in accelerating change. There is momentum from several federal policy changes over the past few years that have enabled health plans to deliver integrated services at scale. For example, Medicare Advantage now accepts all ESRD beneficiaries, opening the door for MA plans to offer coordinated kidney care, out-of-pocket caps, and disease-specific supplemental benefits. 

Looking ahead, more needs to be done. Congress and CMS can further expand and enhance value-based models that reward integrated chronic care by making telehealth expansion permanent and ensuring Medicare Advantage is stable for all beneficiaries. Investments in broadband, caregiver support, and home-based technologies will also go a long way to ensure no patient is left behind. 

Gerard is back to enjoying what he loves – fishing, boating and seeing his family – not because of a cure or a specific therapy, but because of a personalized approach. He has not been admitted to a hospital in over seven years. 

Gerard’s story is the future of healthcare.  Millions of seniors can get access to treatment and care similarly if we are willing to transform the care model into a simpler, more personalized approach that puts the patient at the center. 

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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